This invention is related to method and apparatus to manage virtual ports, logical units and statistics information regarding the virtual ports on storage systems.
SAN switches implement zoning among plurality of ports and make one or more exclusive portions of network by referring name service (i.e. name list) held in the switch. World Wide Port Name (WWPN), an unique identifier assigned to a port in a Fibre Channel (FC) Fabric, could be used for zone control. Fibre Channel is one type of protocol/specification for storage area network (SAN) that is network to connect servers (i.e. host computers) and storage systems. Recent development of the N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) technique allows multiple N_Port IDs to share a single physical N_Port in a FC or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) facility. This allows transferability of virtual ports as described in US 2009/0025007A1.
In order to manage a plurality of virtual ports in information systems, relationships between the physical ports logical units on the storage systems needs to be managed and maintained by the storage system.